Short Works Award for Poetry

“This is the Last Backyard and Other Poems”

Judy Kaber

What inspired you to write this series of poems?

This series of poems deals with my grief at the death of my ex-husband. We had been married for 13 years and had two sons, but had little contact after our sons were grown. He became seriously ill so I went out to see him after being apart for almost 40 years. What surprised me was the emotional connection we still had. He and I had very different beliefs, but we had shared the intense years of young adulthood and I knew that once he was gone no one else would share those memories.

What makes poetry essential to you?

Poetry is essential to me in many ways. I love language and there is no other expression of language as intense as poetry. It allows me to hold on to the everyday beauty of the world as well as dealing with the pain of being human. Poetry helps me make sense of the world, whether the local or international, the natural or man-made. I love the sound and taste of language and especially the power that it has to move people.

Which poet has had the biggest influence on your work?

This has changed over the years. In cleaning my desk out, I recently came across a program from a reading given by Denise Levertov in Portland, sponsored by MWPA. For a while she was a major influence. There are many poets that I read and love now—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kaveh Akbar, Tracy K. Smith, among others—but the poet who I have to name as my strongest influence is Dorianne Laux. I am in love with her ability to pay attention to small details and to weave both darkness and light into wonderful, compelling poems.

Youth Award for Poetry

“would you love the earth”

Oliver Black

How did you first become interested in poetry?

I got into poetry after joining the poetry club at Falmouth High School. Originally, I saw poetry as an outlet to improve on songwriting. There was one junior who I admired. We used to sit on the bus together on our way to our D&D sessions, and one day he handed me his notebook and had me read one of his poems. I think it was then that I realized that poetry was a legit form, because his poems were like a gut-punch. It made me want to treat it seriously.

Why do you think poetry isn't as popular as other forms of writing?

I often hear a lot of my classmates talk down on poetry, especially poems that don't follow an AB rhyme form, and I think most of it is because poetry is a form where you go into it to sit with yourself and think about the words on the page. It's not like reading a novel, which in itself is unpopular. Where you could sit down with a book and generally get through without really thinking about the implications of the message, to enjoy poetry, you have to think about it. And I think that's the main reason a lot of poets don't sell well, but also a part of why I love them so much.

What are the themes you most address in your poetry?

Most of my poetry have themes of nature. I care a lot about climate change, and I've grown to weave nature elements into most of my poetry, even when it isn't about nature because I think it builds more of a respect for the environment in my mind and in anyone's who reads my pieces. On top of that, I try to dissect human interaction in my poetry and how visceral it can feel, which I think I accomplished most in the final piece of "would you love the earth", called constellation bodies, but still wriggles its way into most of my pieces.

Award for Drama

“Mary Shelley: Year with No Summer”

Jule Selbo

What are some of the unique challenges or considerations you encounter when writing plays?

Playwriting was my first love. It started at around age ten when I would write a play and rehearse it with the neighborhood kids and then we’d put it on in my garage and charge the adults a nickel per performance. It was fun and collaborative. As I got older, I realized one of the reasons I loved writing plays was that – for the most part – they’re driven by dialogue. Characters come to life through what they say, how they say it and what others say about them. Of course, what characters do is super important too, but in comparison with screenplays where action can (and often should) carry the day – or in novels where a writer can easily communicate to the reader a person’s thoughts – plays are meant to be presented before a live audience, on a stage, with words and ideas spoken out loud, by actors. It’s fun trying to make each word count, to move the story along with just dialogue, to make each exchange have a unique shape and cadence, depending on which character is speaking, to try to fashion emotional exchanges that feel real and not expository or manipulative. In addition, it’s fun that the experience is different every night because it is live, and, if the play was mounted by different directors (with different actors in different theater spaces), new collaborating ‘stamps’ are always added to the mix. It’s never stagnant.

How do you find playwriting different from other forms of writing?

I consider myself lucky to have gained a lot of Hollywood experience in writing for television and film and I’ve worked with amazing filmmakers. I loved every minute of it. But playwriting is special – and it’s a very different from screenwriting. In my opinion, attempting the ‘cut-to’ or ‘fade in’ or ‘dissolve to’ that we all know about (consciously or subconsciously) in films is not usually successful on stage. Once a scene breaks, or a set changes, or a costume needs to be changed, tension can slip away and the playwright has to scramble to get the audience back. On screen, that ‘problem’ doesn’t exist, it can all be seamless. The pace of storytelling in plays is definitely different, and the kinds of stories that work to maximum effect on stage is different. Also, when I tackle a play, I am not as concerned about plot — I am more interested in exploring an idea or theme. Sure, I like things to ‘happen’, but the plot doesn’t have to dominate in the way that’s expected in most stories written for film and tv.

What was it about Mary Shelley that inspired this work?

I love history and I love reading about the early beginnings of sciences and how new scientific discoveries were woven into our lives. The genesis of the tale, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus intrigued me – as it has intrigued a lot of people. In the early 1800s, electricity (instead of Prometheus’ gift of fire) had recently being ‘discovered as a science’ and was on a fast track to be harnessed. Circuses and traveling carnivals would have entertainments of dead animal carcasses being ‘electrocuted’ – causing a jerking (a re-animationthat appeared to be renewed life) and people were scared and fascinated by it. Mary Shelley witnessed these tricks – and a few ‘magicians’ even used electricity to re-animate the corpses of criminals who were hanged in public. Mary Shelley grew up outside London and could have witnessed the public hangings (these too were an odd and horrific form of entertainment).

And I wanted to see if I could write a horror story for the stage. Plays in the thriller genre can work quite well: Wait Until Dark (Frederick Knott), a few based on Agatha Christie’s work, DeathTrap (Ira Levin), Gaslight (Patrick Hamilton), The Pillowman (Martin McDonagh), Sleuth (Anthony Shaffer) and more. A play of mine, (Boxes) was in the thriller genre and presented at the Good Theatre in Portland a few years ago. But horror stories onstage are not as common: Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux/Andrew Lloyd Webber) and Sweeney Todd (Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler) come to mind, but the list is not long. Horror stories, in general, focus on an exploration of evil – but, because in theatre we also want to entertain as well as suggest themes and ideas, I wanted to explore evil in theatrical ways – in relationships, in how we treat each other, in the state of the world at the time, climate woes, selfishness (etc.) and present some good scares too. Mary Shelley’s life and the story of why she wrote Frankenstein during the ‘Year of No Summer’ gave me the opportunity to do all these things.

Just a few facts that drew me into telling my version of why Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s mom, M. Wollstonecraft (a well-known feminist at the time) died days after giving birth to Mary, and she harbored guilt for that. In her mid-teens, Mary ran off with another woman’s husband (Percy Shelley the poet), and his young wife, bereft, committed suicide. Mary felt guilt about that. The child of Mary and Percy died, very young. More guilt. She had ambitions to be a writer and to fulfill her mother’s championing of women empowerment, but her husband was a famous writer and she had subsumed herself to him and his art. More angst, more unhappiness and guilt. When the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia 1815 triggered a global climate change and literally darkened the skies across Europe, pitting it into the “Year with No Summer,” Mary was ‘trapped’ in a secluded home in Switzerland with narcissistic, vain, selfish Lord Byron, her depressed husband Percy, an annoying cousin Claire, and a young doctor John Polidori who struggled with lack of self-esteem and a lust/love for cruel Byron. It was as if a playwright couldn’t make up a better cast! There were there, waiting to talk to me. Then, when Mary Shelley, on a dare, set out to write a horror story and she created THE CREATURE, well – that was it. I wanted to see what I could do with all these facets and discover how this Creature could be the real horror villain of the tale and how Mary’s life was forever changed by creating this evil force.

Short Works Award for Fiction

“You’re Supposed to Fall Down”

Dave Patterson

What makes for a good short story?

A good short story boils over with urgency. From the first sentence—even the first word—the reader should feel that the characters must act, decide, run, flee, or freeze for better or for worse. And they need to do it soon. In grad school, the writer Rick Bass once told me that short stories should cook with a barn burning intensity. Over the years, I’ve learned that to mean that every sentence in a short story should generally aspire do one of two things: reveal character or advance the plot. The best sentences do both. I don’t believe that all this urgency needs to manifest in over-the-top scenes or action. In fact it probably shouldn’t. The most urgent struggle for a character can be internal. I love quiet stories where the tension is taking place inside a character. Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge” is a great example of this. “Part 1: Dene Oxedene” by Tommy Orange is another. I also believe that urgency can be about language as much as it can be about plot. I love when a short story is about a writer desperately trying to find the right words to convey a moving experience. There’s a sense in such stories that the writer will explode if she can’t get the words right. I love reading those short stories.

Where did you find inspiration for your characters in this story?

“You’re Supposed to Fall Down” was inspired by a construction site in Scarborough I drove by on my way to work last winter. A contractor tore down acres of woods at Eight Corners. All that was left of this beautiful, wooded lot were piles of smoldering earth. The clear-cutting was shocking. It was also unsettling that no matter how cold it was, these piles of composting earth exhaled thick steam as if breathing. My writer’s brain kept telling me, There’s something ripe in this tortured landscape.

I don’t outline or plan my stories. I start from an image or idea that won’t let me go and I see who shows up. The people who showed up around these piles of smoldering earth were a girl, her mother, and her estranged father. When they arrived, I wondered what had been torn up in their lives, what was still simmering from the past, and how do they go forward into this new landscape they perhaps don’t want to live in. The story is close third person focusing on Graham, the father. He has to decide how he’s going to react to this new world. In writing the story, I wasn’t sure if by the end he was going to do the right thing. His decision didn’t feel up to me; it was truly his choice, as mystical as that might sound. When he made the right decision in the end, I cried. I literally wept at my writing desk. I was rooting for him to find his way inside this externally and internally devastated landscape, and when I knew he was going to make the right decision with all the pain that entailed, I was deeply moved. Their world was going to be put back together, and something uplifting was birthed out of these piles of ravaged earth.

What is the greatest challenge of writing in multiple genres?

For practical purposes, I spend most of my writing time focused on novels. This is largely because writing a novel is hard—there are so many scenes to write and threads to keep alive in my mind. If I step away to write something else, even for a few days, I start losing the pulse of the novel. With that said, I adore writing short stories, poems, and songs. Whenever there’s a window between drafts of a novel, I greedily write a short story or grab my guitar to work on a song.

The biggest challenge of writing in multiple genres isn’t that I need to focus on the craft rules for a specific genre when working in that discipline. Instead, it’s that so often I forget that I should be stealing aspects of other genres to crosspollinate my work. I ask myself questions like: How can the rules of poetry be used in writing the opening of this short story? or How do I make this novel chapter more musical? or What narrative techniques can make the second verse of this song more urgent? I strive to tear down the barriers between genres to make my writing more playful and alive in all genres. If I’m facing a writing problem, the answer is usually found in the craft elements of another genre. In that way, perhaps thinking about genres as separate from one another is as illusory as thinking of the self as an entity separate from the rest of existence.

Youth Award for Fiction

“Memories”

Avery Olson

1. How did you come up with this story?

I wrote this story for a school assignment where I was supposed to take a line from a book I enjoyed and write a short story that started with it. I chose the line “I am made of memories” to start my piece with, which is from The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, one of my all-time favorite authors. When I began to draft my story, I was inspired by the idea of memories and tried to explore how the experiences people have and the memories they hold shape their lives.

2. What is your writing process like?

To be honest my writing process for this piece was a little disorganized. I did not have the piece completely planned out when I began writing it and ended up writing the scenes out of order, piecing them all together when I was finished drafting. Though this was messy it helped encourage me to continue writing the story, allowing me to write parts I enjoyed more at the beginning of my process and get an idea of the characters' personalities before moving on to writing more difficult parts. I was on my winter break when I began writing the story which gave me lots of time to work on it which was very helpful. Of course, my family was not too enthusiastic about me spending so much time huddled over my blue spiral notebook, but luckily they put up with it.

3. What do you hope your readers feel when reading this story?

I hope that when reading this story everybody can relate to it in some way no matter who they are or their experiences in life. The main idea that I tried to communicate is that life is short and it goes by quickly. Though this idea is difficult to understand at the moment, I believe it's important for everyone to live their lives knowing that every single moment matters. After reading this story everybody will have different takeaways, but I hope that everyone will understand how important it is to live their lives to the fullest a little better.

Award for Excellence in Publishing

Downtown, Up River: Bangor in the 1970s (Islandport Press)

Emily Stoddard Burnham

1. Why did you want to document this particular era of Maine history?

From a historical standpoint, I think it's really important that we understand our more recent history -- things that happened within the lifetimes of people alive today -- so that we more fully understand our present and future. Why are our cities here in Maine the way they are? A lot of the decisions made and things that happened in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s set the stage for that. And, well, it's just a lot of fun to look back at this specific era -- the fashion, the fun, the cultural touchstones. For younger readers, it's a nice reminder that your parents were cool too!

2. What was the most surprising thing you discovered in your research?

It was really exciting to dive more deeply into the experiences of people from outside mainstream society in Maine. Specifically, those involved in anti-war, civil rights and feminist causes; the hidden experiences of queer people; and those who embraced the counterculture of the era and lived their lives accordingly. The historical record in Maine does not always document those experiences, but with a little leg work, you can find them.

3. How long did it take from start-to-finish and what obstacles did you run into along the way?

I got started in the spring of 2022. The majority of the work involved going through thousands of pages of both newspaper archives from the Bangor Daily News, and scanning hundreds of photos that we narrowed down into the 140 or so you see in the book. I also spent a lot of time reaching out to local people to share their photos and stories, and just generally doing a lot of reading -- everything from magazine and newspaper articles, to extremely dry government publications, to blog and social media posts from local amateur historians. I did most of the actual writing of the book in August, September and October of 2022. It wasn't due to come out until fall of 2023, however, so there was a pretty long gap before I reconnected with the folks at Islandport in late summer of 2023 to work on other edits and refining the layout. I'd say it was about eight months of work -- all while holding a full-time job. Balancing being a full-time journalist while also working on other projects is tough, but I've been doing it for almost 20 years now and I'm used to the hustle!

Award for Crime Fiction

The Body in the Web

Katherine Hall Page

1. Why did you get into writing crime novels?

My husband took a sabbatical in Lyon, France and it was the first time I had not been working. Previously I had been a secondary school teacher and administrator. Suddenly I had the gift of time to write the mystery novel that had been floating in my mind for some time. I’d always loved reading crime fiction and I’d always wanted to write a novel. I had a pretty clear idea of my character, Faith Fairchild, and it seemed like a good fit to have her come across a still warm corpse in the town’s old belfry!

2. How do you develop your plot and characters?

I did not know I was writing a series with the first book. Nor until my editor asked my agent when St. Martin’s Press could expect the next one in the series. 26 books later I am still stunned. Because it is a series, I have a core group of characters and it has been rewarding to grow them over time, never stinting on the main point of the books: A traditional murder plot. The books alternate between a fictitious town west of Boston, Aleford, and what I call the “Someplace Else Books”. These include the fictitious Sanpere Island in Penobscot Bay. So, I start with location and write a synopsis —what has been floating around in my mind for many weeks. I always know who dies and whodunnit. I go over this with my editor and although this skeleton may change as I write the book, the essentials don’t.

3. What would you say makes your writing unique?

This is a very hard question! Someone else should answer it. Don’t think my writing is unique. Possibly what makes it, the series, different is the main character—as well as the supporting ones. Readers have become attached to the Fairchild family over time and I wrote The Body in the Web spurred by people wanting to know how they were dealing with the pandemic. As if they were real people, not simply words on a page. This gives me enormous pleasure.

Award for Memoir (Co-Winner)

What the Taliban Told Me

Ian Fritz

1. Why did you want to share this personal story with the world?

The book came about after I wrote an essay that was published in The Atlantic about the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan. The impetus for that essay was that I felt that I had to tell the world about how I, and thousands of others, knew way back in 2011 that it was just a matter of time until the Taliban were once again in power. My now literary agent read that essay and asked me whether I had thought about writing a book. I had not, but he encouraged me to share more of my story, and here we are.

2. How often and to what extent did you consider the reader's perspective when writing your memoir? Did that change the way you wrote about your story?

I did not consider the reader’s perspective beyond trying to make sure all the various acronyms and military speak were (somewhat) understandable. A fair number of people have asked me this question, and I hadn’t even considered it until months after the book was published. I don’t know that considering the reader’s perspective is either actually possible in writing a memoir, or, if it is possible, a useful exercise. I suspect that you then start to enter a mindset of story creating, not necessarily storytelling, and for works of nonfiction, that seems like a slippery slope.

3. What was the most surprising thing you learned through the process of writing your memoir?

I wrote 95% of the book as it is now published in three months. (There are a lot of caveats to this: I have an incredibly supportive partner, I work remotely part-time, I don’t have children, and I generally have far more control over my time than most people who are beholden to our systems of capital.) I think there’s this idea that writing has to take time, or that it has to be difficult, or that you’ll have to write many many drafts before you figure out what you want to say, and I found that those things aren’t always true. Some days, sure, I only write 300 words, but most days I hit my goal of 1000. Some chapters I had to rewrite ten times, but more than a few I was able to get done in one or two drafts. I will say that it was taxing, in the way that any major intellectual effort is taxing, but it was rarely hard. And, in those moments when it was hard, that usually meant that I was trying to force something that didn’t work. The final caveat is that I had the additional luxury of having spent a fair amount of the last ten years thinking, off and on, about my career in the military, such that many of my thoughts, while not fully crystallized, had at least been refined such that I wasn’t starting from scratch. More than anything, it was this feeling that I had done enough thinking to write the full story that surprised me.

Award for Young People’s Literature

The Sharp Edge of Silence

Cameron Kelly Rosenblum

**1.      What inspires you to write books for Young Adults?**
Growing up is almost by definition heroic. Even as a young adult myself, I loved coming-of-age stories. The awakening feelings in teens are huge: Love, Morality, Loyalty, Identity. Emotion can outstrip reason (it sure did for me), creating a sometimes-reckless commitment to fitting in and figuring out who you are. How this unfolds for each person is dependent on social context and an endless variety of circumstances. What better period of life to harvest for fiction?
**2.     How do you approach a story like this?**
I wanted to push readers into the gray areas around the novel’s themes of social power, friendship, romantic relationships, sexual autonomy, and loyalty versus justice. We all know that real girls have been date-raped by “normal” guys who go unpunished for all sorts of reasons. I felt the need to honor those stories with an honest exploration of the conditions that allow them to keep happening. I didn’t want to gloss over those social mechanisms with a simple narrative. Avoiding the “all males are toxic” notion was a top priority, along with resisting preachiness. I told myself to present the story and trust readers to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong.
**3.     In what ways do you hope to impact young people with this book?**
I really want to give young people a springboard to think about and discuss where they stand on things, important things. What would you do if you were Max, suddenly catapulted from social irrelevance to running with alpha wolves? Would you compromise your principles to stay with them? What if you were Charlotte and realized your seemingly devoted dream boyfriend was wrapped up in a misogynistic secret society? Would you confront him?  What if you or your friend were like Quinn, raped by a popular upperclassman but without any evidence? Would vigilante justice best settle the score? What if you have all these secrets? Do you tell? If so, who? In the book, the Lycroft Phelps School uses a question, ultimately ironic, as part of its credo: *Who will you be?* It’s on the elite school’s website, marketing materials, and tee-shirts. That’s my wink to the readers. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Award for Children’s Book

Hidden Hope

Elisa Boxer

1. How do you hope to impact children with your writing?

I’m drawn to telling stories about heroes who never set out to become heroes. Especially underdogs. Little-known and underestimated people who harnessed their courage in barrier-breaking ways; who went against social norms to stand up for something they believed in. When I really dig in to why I write for children, this is it. I want to inspire young readers to get in touch with that hero within. I want them to uncover what really matters to them, and to know that they’re inherently worthy of following that, even if it’s an unpopular course of action. I hope my writing can help give children the encouragement to tap into and honor their inner voice, especially when it’s saying something different from all the other loud voices around them.

2. What was your intention for writing this book about the Holocaust?

At first, I set out to tell the story of this remarkable teenager in the French Resistance. Her name was Judith Geller, and she used a hollowed-out toy duck to hide false identity papers from the Nazis. But as I researched the story further and began to draft it, I was particularly struck by the fact that the duck is now in a museum, out in the open, under bright lights, for all to see. In my mind, I juxtaposed that with the all the hiding that took place in World War Two – not just the duck hiding the documents, but also people hiding their identities, hiding their families, and some making the devastating decision to send only their children into hiding. Children, given their smaller size, were easier to smuggle to safety.

So, to me, another layer of this story is the duck as a symbol of shining a light on the truth. The Nazis tried to cover up their crimes when they realized they were losing the war. And here is this toy that survived to help tell the world the truth. Another theme that emerged during my writing process, as I was immersed in this story of hiding, was the importance of never having to hide the truth of who you are. I found myself asking some uncomfortable questions, such as where in my life do I feel like I have to hide my feelings, opinions, or beliefs because they won’t be accepted? These aren’t often conscious questions. And they’re certainly not fun ones to explore. But I hope one of the takeaways for young readers, as well as parents, caregivers, and educators, is deciding to show up in any given situation as the most authentic version of who they are. Never hiding. Always bringing their fullest selves into the room and the conversation. That’s something I emphasize when I go into schools and talk about this book with students, how important it is to recognize situations where they might not feel accepted, and to seek out people who make them feel safe to express who they are.

Award for Speculative Fiction

Karma of the Sun

Brandon Ying Kit Boey

**1. Where did the idea for this novel come from?**
The idea for the novel came from a picture that found its way somehow into my mind of a boy journeying on foot to a mountain in a desolate place at the end of the world. Years later, as I became more interested in stories of the apocalypse from around the world, I became fascinated with some recurring themes which kept popping up, which include a cyclicality of time, a renew of the earth, and a gathering of people for a dharmic restoration. I became particularly fascinated with the traditions coming out of Tibet, and found that a post-apocalyptic novel set in the Himalayas and informed by their cosmology was the perfect backdrop for that same story of the boy and the mountain for which I’d had that haunting flash of inspiration. I had never seen a post-apocalyptic story told from an Asian perspective, or in such a setting as the Himalayas, but what I loved in writing it was the discovery that in facing the end, time and space lose all meaning, and that there are some universal truths that can be revealed as a result.
**2. What was the research process like?**
The research was very interesting. In some ways, there’s surprisingly little by way of secondary sources on the topics I was interested in. What this meant was having to spend a lot of time directly in English translations of primary sources. The material forms the foundation of so much of the mythos in *Karma of the Sun*. For example, I ended up using verses directly from The Lotus Sutra and the Pali Canon in the epigraphs. The Lotus Sutra is a book in the Tibetan Buddhist canon from the 1st century CE, which contains a lot of very beautiful stories and allegories about the path to enlightenment. The Pali Canon is an even older collection of texts believed to be from 29 BCE, including a sermon attributed to the Buddha about the earth’s apocalyptic fate due to seven suns that cause progressive ruin until the planet is destroyed. These inform much of the background on the cataclysms that are the backdrop of the novel, and which hint at the future of the world.
**3. What do you think it is about apocalyptic stories that draws people in?**
I wrote an article for Lit Hub/Crime Reads about this exact question, called “Why We Can’t Quit the Apocalypse,” musing on the popularity of these types of stories. The thesis can perhaps be summed up in the epiphany that Karma has in the book when he recognizes that “apocalypses, great and small, come for them all.” We all will face mortality—an end—and we know it. Yet the irony is that we don’t always live in a way that acknowledges that. How might our choices, our relationships, our use of time be different with this at the forefront of our mind? I think apocalyptic stories give us an opportunity remember that life is finite and precious, that we might change the way we live. There are lots of other reasons—the spectacle of the kind of destruction, the vicarious experience of imagining oneself in the extremeness of that kind of situation—but I am interested in the catharsis of having to imagine the end and the reflection that follows of how to live life with the time one has left.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Award for Fiction

The Road to Dalton

Shannon Bowring

1. What inspired you to make this book?

Growing up in Ashland, a tiny town located all the way up in Aroostook County, I was often torn between a fierce love of the land and a sense that I didn’t always fit in with my community. Part of this dissonance was a result of spending most of my first six years in and out of hospitals with two congenital heart defects. The trauma of multiple operations, including two open-heart surgeries, left me feeling anxious and isolated most of my childhood. Even after I was physically healed, I always felt like the other.

What helped was reading stories and books, imagining worlds beyond my own rural landscape. When I read, I could be anyone, anywhere. The evolution from reader to writer happened quite naturally—I started keeping journals in first grade, filling them with my own stories. As I grew older, I (perhaps ironically) began to set many of these narratives in the town I was most familiar with, which I called Dalton, in honor of the brief period in time when that was actually Ashland’s name.

Beginning in my mid-twenties, I started focusing on creating a story collection and/or novel (or series of novels) that centered around Dalton. I wanted to honor the beauty of the landscape I came from and shine a light on an area of Maine that is largely underrepresented in literature. I also wanted to explore the many different ways characters might feel like outsiders in their own town, much as I did when I was growing up. I love to imagine all the possibilities for how this otherness might manifest in such a tight-knit community.

While I still hope my work helps put Aroostook County on the literary map of Maine, it’s been even more humbling to experience people from everywhere (even from away) who identify with Dalton, recognizing something of their own hometowns within it. I think a place like Dalton appeals to readers because we have all felt, at least once, like the “other.” And I’m grateful my books can give outsiders like myself a safe place to reside and feel included.

2. How do you go about creating characters?

I actually believe my characters ultimately create themselves.

A good example is one of the main characters in Dalton, Nate Theroux. Nate has been living in my brain for about a decade now. He first appeared as a tall, gangly shadow, a reluctant yet kindhearted cop. I knew he had a daughter and that he’d gone through a personal tragedy. But I didn’t discover his entire narrative or deeper complexities until I started writing that first book and allowed him to walk on those gangly legs into places I didn’t expect.

Bev Theroux, Trudy Haskell, Dr. Haskell, Greg Fortin, Rose Douglas... all of them sparked into existence in a similar way. First a shadow of a character in my head, then a fully formed person leading me through each page, telling me their story and asking me to honor them by writing that story as best I could.

I do choose certain things about my characters very intentionally, particularly their names. A lot goes into a name: the personality of a character, the time and place they were born. I do a lot of research on the meaning of first and last names, baby-name trends by decade, and popular names by region.

Whenever I write about Dalton, I am hyper-aware, and a little afraid, of accidentally including a character whose name is too similar to that of someone from Ashland or the towns surrounding it. There are only so many French-Canadian surnames I can come up with before one inevitably, yet unintentionally, hits too close to home for somebody.

3. Did you worry about writing fiction about a place some might think is close to where you grew up?

Of course! Particularly with the first book in the series, I put a lot of pressure on myself to get the County “right” on the page, from local humor to patterns of speech to the smell of the woods in winter.

But the more I write about Dalton, the more it has become its own universe, independent of the places that inspired it. This began in The Road to Dalton and became much more pronounced while I was writing the sequel, Where the Forest Meets the River (on sale 9/3/24). The setting has changed slightly from the landscape of Ashland and the County to accommodate the needs of my characters—I’ve had to add a barn here, move a river there, etc. This growing separation between real place and imagined town has allowed me a freedom to explore the narratives on a deeper level and to add more nuance to my characters.

So, while I acknowledge my hometown as the inspiration for Dalton, I’m excited to see how the fictional place keeps evolving to become something more than I ever could have imagined when I started writing the first book.

I understand, however, that for readers who still live in Ashland, they no doubt still find that town in my work, from familiar landmarks to characters they may believe are based off actual people who live there. While I always give the disclaimer that each event and character in Dalton is fictional, I also recognize I have no control over how readers will bring their own perceptions and experiences to the page.

That’s the beauty of fiction: Everyone can adapt it to fit into their individual story, to reflect their own familiar universe back at them.

2024 MLA Interviews